What involves a reader in a story, be it fiction or non-fiction, are interesting characters or people to whom they can relate. And, the same is true for the public relations message of your school.

I have a friend who is a news bureau chief for a major metropolitan daily newspaper. I asked for his input to help me identify the best way to pitch stories to reporters. His response was immediate:

“You have to make your story about people.”

Apparently, one of the essential elements many PR professionals forget in relaying the “big story” to the media is the people angle. For example, your school might wish to promote the first graduation ceremony for a new campus, so you have someone on your staff or the PR firm with which you are working make a media pitch. The event is meaningful to you, after all. If you can see its intrinsic value, then everyone else certainly can, right?

Unfortunately, graduations and new school openings for proprietary schools are a dime a dozen to the news media. Why? It’s the same story and the same photo opportunity. What’s missing here is the human element.

Refocusing this event to include interview opportunities with students in the community in which the new school opened will make this event look a lot more appealing. Identify a student whose life will be changed by your school opening its doors in this new location. What was their path to this school? What hardships had they faced before your school opened? In this sense, your students are the characters in your gradation story and it’s their success stories that appeal to readers in the local community through the news media.

No one who picks up a newspaper cares about an event. Their interests lie below the surface, with the very people whose lives you help change. A good, old-fashioned human interest story is the key to the media’s heart and an easy way for your school to tell its story to the community.